Paul
Manafort, former campaign manager for U.S. President Donald Trump
arrives for a bond hearing at U.S. District Court in
WashingtonThomson
Reuters

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's flight
records show that he traveled to Moscow at least 18 times
while advising the pro-Russian strongman Viktor
Yanukovych, who later became Ukraine's president.

Yanukovych fled to Russia in 2014, but Manafort
continued advising Ukraine's Opposition Bloc — a political
party that is considered even closer to the Kremlin than
Ukraine's Party of Regions.

Manafort's spokesman, Jason Maloni,
said Manafort’s trips to Russia were “related to his
work on behalf of" the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s
"commercial interests.”

President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort,
traveled to Moscow at least 18 times between 2004-2011,
while he served as a top adviser to ousted Ukrainian
president Viktor Yanukovych and the pro-Russia Party of
Regions.

Manafort visited Ukraine at least 138 times between
2004-2015, according to McClatchy. He traveled to Moscow the
most between 2005-2006, but took additional trips there through
2011.

Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 amid
widespread protests over his last-minute decision to reject
a deal that would have fostered stronger ties between Ukraine and
the European Union, and instead pursued closer ties with
Moscow. Yanukovych fled to Russia when the
protests escalated, but Manafort continued advising Ukraine's
Opposition Bloc — a political party that is considered even more
pro-Russia than the Party of Regions.

Manafort's trips to Russia are not the only ones that may be of
interest to Mueller. He and his longtime Russian-Ukrainian
business associate Konstantin Kilimnik reportedly traveled to
Frankfurt in July 2013 on a private plane owned by
Andrey Artemenko — a Ukrainian lawmaker who met with Trump's
lawyer, Michael Cohen, and longtime Trump Organization
adviser Felix Sater in January to present them with a
Russia-Ukraine "peace plan" that involved easing
sanctions.

Paul
Manafort.AP Photo/Andrew
Harnik

A federal grand jury indicted Manafort
and his longtime business associate, Rick Gates, in October
on 12 counts, including money laundering, tax fraud,
and failing to register as foreign agents. Federal
prosecutors said in a court filing
that both men had received "millions of dollars" from
Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs that would allow them "to live
comfortably abroad" and therefore make them a flight risk.

Citing financial documents filed in Cyprus, The New York Times
reported in July
that Manafort was in debt to pro-Russian interests by as much as
$17 million by the time he joined Trump's campaign team in March
2016.

Manafort also has significant business ties to the Russian
billionaire Oleg Deripaska, who signed
a$10
million annual contract with Manafortin
2006 for a lobbying project in the US that Manafort said would
"greatly benefit the Putin Government," The Associated Press
reported in March.

Manafort's spokesman Jason Maloni toldBusiness Insider that airplane records "do not demonstrate
anything other than Mr. Manafort was in Moscow for his well-known
commercial work with Oleg Deripaska or was connecting through
Moscow on his way to and from the US."

In July 2016, Manafort offered private briefings
about the campaign to Deripaska in the hopes of resolving a
years-long business dispute stemming from a failed business deal
the two pursued in 2008 involving a Ukrainian TV company called
Black Sea Cable.

Legal complaints filed by Deripaska's representatives in
the Cayman Islands in 2014 said he gave Manafort $19 million to
invest in the company, but the project fell through and Manafort
all but disappeared without paying back Deripaska.

Deripaska's representatives were "openly" accusing Manafort of
fraud and pledging to recover the money from him as recently as
early 2016, according to the Associated Press. But they
reportedly backed off the accusations shortly after Manafort
joined the campaign in the spring.

"How do we use to get whole," Manafort responded. "Has OVD
operation seen?"

Russia-linked entities dangled compromising information
about Clinton to the Trump campaign at least
twice after Manafort was enlisted to corral convention
delegates in March 2016.

The campaign's stance on Russia's interference in eastern
Ukraine did not seem
aligned with traditional GOP orthodoxy, either: An
amendment to the GOP's draft policy on Ukraine,
which proposed that the GOP commit to sending "lethal
weapons" to the Ukrainian army to fend off Russian aggression,
was ultimately softened to say "provide appropriate
assistance" before it was included in the party's official
platform in 2016.

The Trump campaign also did not provide a letter to
the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America recognizing
Ukraine's 25th year of independence after the fall of the Soviet
Union, according to McClatchy. The Clinton campaign did.

A young campaign foreign policy adviser named George
Papadopoulos was told in late
April that the Kremlin had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the
form of "thousands of emails," according to court documents filed
by Mueller and unsealed late last month.

Papadopoulos asked Manafort in
an email on May 21, after learning of the dirt, whether he could
arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian
officials: Russia has been eager to meet with Mr. Trump for
some time and have been reaching out to me to discuss," he
wrote.

Manafort forwarded that email to Gates, adding: "Let's discuss.
We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips.
It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send
any signal."

A few weeks later, Manafort attended a meeting
at Trump Tower on the promise of obtaining similar Clinton "dirt"
from a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer.

Manafort's prominent campaign role and history of working with
Ukrainian and Russia-linked entities apparently spurred the FBI
to seek a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant to
surveil him at least
twice between 2014-2016.

Manafort resigned as Trump's campaign chairman shortly after The
New York Times reported that the pro-Russia political party he
had worked for had earmarked him$12.7
millionfor his work between 2007 and 2012.
Ukrainian prosecutors havesaidthey've found no
proof of illicit payments to Manafort, who has said he never
collected the payments.